The Rev. Jasmine Beach-Ferrara, director of the Asheville-based Campaign for Southern Equality, has a piece in Advocate on the ways LGBT Southerners are challenging restrictive laws:
Each day, LGBT people in the South face a set of moral choices. Will we be defined by the fundamental truths of our lives or by state laws that regard us as second-class citizens? Take me and my wife, Meghann. We are legally married and yet North Carolina, where we live, regards us as legal strangers. Through acts both mundane and intimate, we choose to resist these laws and the anti-gay animus they breed – from listing each other as spouses on every form we fill out to holding hands as we walk down the sidewalk. Sometimes this is effortless. Sometimes, when strangers eyes track us, it’s hard. In these moments, Meghann’s hand on my back bolsters me.
For me, it feels clear – and clearer each day – that resistance is the way forward, not just in our private lives but also in the public square. Laws cannot regulate our capacity to love any more than they can our ability to hope or dream. Laws that seek to do so are immoral because they degrade our humanity. They are unconstitutional because they violate our basic freedoms. And yet these laws remain on the books in every Southern state, causing harm each day.
Growing numbers of people across the South are finding the courage to stand up to such laws by taking public action. Since the WE DO Campaign launched two years ago, I have stood with more than 80 LGBT couples as they have requested – and been denied – marriage licenses in their home towns across the South, from small rural towns in Mississippi to cities like Charlotte, N.C. To watch LGBT people stand at the marriage license counter, many with their children at their side, is to witness courage first hand. In the face of a legal system that denies our humanity and tells us we have no right to even approach this counter, these families are expressing powerful truths – we are human, we are equal, this is our home, and we have a fundamental right to marry.
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